HIZBULLAH HIDES BEHIND HUMAN SHIELDS
By Mike Evans
In the war against terrorism, public opinion has grown to accept one of the most obscene tactics of Islamist fanaticism: the suicide bomber. The liberal media don’t blink at terrorist masterminds brainwashing innocent Palestinian children into seeking “martyrdom” by blowing themselves up among innocent Israeli children. There is no moral outrage at this practice; on the contrary, it has become acceptable as the way they “must” fight Israel.
The Islamist terrorists’ disregard for the lives of their own civilians became even more blatant following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last summer. Since then Hamas terrorists have fired more than 700 Kassam rockets at Israeli towns in the western Negev, launching them from the midst of their own civilian population in Gaza in the expectation these human shields would protect them from Israeli counterattack.
The media consider it perfectly natural for Islamist fanatics to cynically endanger their own people in the expectation Israel would show greater concern for Arab lives. This is surely a new twist in the theater of the absurd and hypocrisy that is the Middle East.
But the same people who inspired the Palestinian suicide bombers and human shields – the Iranians – have brought us a new concept in Lebanon: holding an entire country hostage as human shields. Hizbullah terrorists have so far bombarded the towns and cities of northern Israel with more than 1,500 Iranian-supplied missiles, virtually all of them launched from the midst of Lebanon’s civilian population.
Hizbullah cynically places its launchers, stores its rockets, and fires them from densely populated towns and villages. It expects Israel not to retaliate, because it knows how Israeli soldiers are taught to take great care not to harm civilians, sometimes at the risk of their own safety. Hizbullah has thus created a win-win situation for itself: it fires missiles indiscriminately at Israeli civilians while hiding behind the human shield of its own civilians, and if Israel fires back and inadvertently hits Lebanese non-combatants, Hizbullah wins again in public opinion.
Even though Israel is entitled to strike back in self-defense under international law, and Hizbullah is violating that law by hiding behind civilians, the short-sighted media only report that civilians were harmed by Israel. But international law recognizes the principle that, if civilian casualties are caused by Hizbullah fighters hiding behind non-combatants, Hizbullah is responsible for placing their lives at risk. Piling one obscenity on another, Hizbullah then uses the corpses of the involuntarily “martyred” children to stage photo opportunities for a gullible press, inviting condemnation upon Israel for its own deeds.
The latest Hizbullah stage-managed atrocity occurred in the village of Qana, which housed the terrorist organization’s regional headquarters and where its fighters, under command of their Iranian “advisers”, spent the last six years since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon building underground fortifications and storehouses for some of the 12,000 missiles Iran has supplied. In the past few weeks, Hizbullah has fired some 150 missiles from Qana at Haifa and other towns of northern Israel.
Days before silencing the missiles of Qana, however, Israeli planes dropped thousands of leaflets warning civilians to leave and go north – along two corridors of safe passage it had provided in coordination with the United Nations. This warning of a pending attack would be considered exceptional by any other army in the world – but not Israel’s. Hizbullah, on the other hand, considers any Lebanese a disposable “martyr” in its war against the Jews.
Dr. Michael D. Evans is the New York Times bestselling author of The American Prophecies and Beyond Iraq: the Next Move. His latest book, Showdown with Nuclear Iran is set to be released shortly by Thomas Nelson publishers.
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